James Kopf

James Kopf is a PhD student in German literature & culture at Penn State University; his dissertation will focus on the philosophy of music. He has presented papers at professional conferences on topics such as Adorno & phenomenology, Sun Ra’s philosophy, and ontology & black metal. Most of the time, you can find him listening to or thinking about music, but he’ll gladly talk your ear off about the occult and non-representational art, too. La Monte Young’s “The Well-Tuned Piano” is both his favorite album and his prized possession.

Approaching levels of alienation that most black metal projects can only hope to achieve, this album diffracts its religious subject matter, turning it against itself in a strange materialist thought experiment.

Spread across 11 tracks, Maron plays his stripped-down version of Réunion’s native maloya music seemingly on the drumhead of history, reducing the music to its barest elements and recreating them on modular synths to echo both forward and backward simultaneously. It can have a stunning effect.

If so much music associated with “ritual” is unnecessarily baroque, Inhumankind serves as a sort of corrective. The music here is not overwhelming, it doesn’t foist modern melodies onto an imagined past, and you won’t find bizarre odes to pagan ancestors.

In this sense, they follow a long lineage of Swiss intellectual culture; in this album, with its festive folk meanderings, its lauding of tradition, while simultaneously breaking with it in a sometimes violent way, Ungfell travels the same path as (the perennially ignored) Jeremias Gotthelf and Robert Walser.

This album occupies a neat little niche between post-rock, desert rock, and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, with wide open spaces that nevertheless allow you to feel the claustrophobia of an old growth forest.

I’m just coming off watching Blade Runner 2049, so reviewing this album makes perfect sense. The songs here on Neraterræ’s The NHART Demo[n]s soundtrack the vacant listlessness of the various empty and lost spaces and people that one encounters in that sort of futurist dystopia.

I don’t want to write this album off based on a single song, but, in this instance, it’s hard. I can’t see a way of making this forgivable. I don’t want to hear ‘Todesfuge’ being read by Celan over lilting guitars. I don’t want to hear it after a solo. I don’t want to hear it transition into a guitar-driven piece. None of that makes any sense to me.

This album is not just interesting as an historical document or a great example of lo-fi black metal, but it can and should also be appreciated as a philosophical statement – even if Enslaved did not intend it as such.